The Press: A National Embarrassment

Dan Rather's phony documents not only could have made the difference between Bush being re-elected or not (which was probably the idea), but CBS was caught red-handed.

"Yes, it's true, and it's not because of anything obviously Donald Trump did. The press did all that good work ruining its reputation on its own, and we can have a long conversation about what created that." -CBS anchor John Dickerson

"We couldn’t help her any more than we have, she’s got just a free ride so far from the media, we’re the biggest ones promoting her campaign, so it had better happen." -CNN’s Chris Cuomo

According to a recent Gallup poll, six in ten Americans now have little or no confidence in the national media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. -Rep. Lamar Smith

“Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.” -Thomas Friedman

Time magazine editor Richard Stengel presented the cover of his new July 4 issue, which features the U.S. Constitution going through a paper shredder and asks does the document still matter. According to Stengel, it does, but not as much anymore.

The Press: Overwhelmingly White

Olbermann also implores Tea Party members to look around them and ask why there are so few African-Americans, Hispanics, and homosexuals among them...

The profession isn't getting much more diverse: 92 percent of journalists were white in 1992, and 92 percent of journalists were white in 2012. - Derek Thompson

Among the progressive publications I examined, The Nation scored the lowest, with slightly over 4 percent of its staff hailing from racial and ethnic minority groups. -Gabriel Arana

Nearly 40 percent of the country is non-white and/or Hispanic, but the number of minorities at the outlets included in this article's tally—most of them self-identified as liberal or progressive—hovers around 10 percent. -Gabriel Arana

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.

The Blogfather: Understanding the Press...

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

It's almost as if "what's news" is just a synonym for "what advances the narrative chosen by the Democratic Party." The question that "news" operations like CNN may want to ask is, how many people are really interested in getting their news from party organs. -Glenn Reynolds

The sex was — quite literally — killer. Bob Caldwell, 63, editor of The Oregonian’s editorial pages for over 20 years, succumbed to cardiac arrest following a “sex act” with a 23-year-old woman in her Tigard, Ore. apartment Saturday. The Portland Community College student told police that she began an affair with Caldwell over a year ago, and that he would give her money to buy school books in exchange for sex, The Oregonian reported.

"I have said before… [that I] thought the media helped tip the scales. I didn’t think the coverage in 2008 was especially fair to either Hilary Clinton or John McCain.” -Jake Tapper

But I will say this, and here is one of chilling aspects working in the mainstream media. Two points. When I was at "Newsweek" when it looked like the exit polls were in and George W. Bush was going to lose to John Kerry, people were doing high fives in the newsroom. -Charlie Gasparino

MRCTV's Joe Schoffstall ran into "Good Morning America" host George Stephanopoulos at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. When asked if he believes there is a liberal bias in the media, he responds,"I don't." When asked again, he walks away.

Law enforcement officials from a New York region where a local paper published a map identifying gun owners say prisoners are using the information to intimidate guards. Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco, who spoke at a news conference flanked by other county officials, said the Journal News' decision to post an online map of names and addresses of handgun owners Dec. 23 has put law enforcement officers in danger. "They have inmates coming up to them and telling them exactly where they live.

Time Warner's Time Inc. will lay off up to 700 staffers out of just under 8,000 total as the publisher's new chief struggles to transform famous titles and massive market share into a digital profit center.

An NBCUniversal executive, Joe Waz, is hosting a fundraiser today for Hillary Clinton. "Clinton has arrived at her first fundraiser of the day. NBCUniversal executive Joe Waz, and his wife Cynthia Telles, are hosting the event," Dan Merica of CNN reports on Twitter.

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saying he sees some in the his party favoring a 2016 presidential candidate with an immigration policy that would “round up people . . . and send them back to Mexico.” A subsequent Associated Press review of an audio recording of the show determined that the transcript had dropped the word “don’t” from that quote, and Paul actually said, “They don’t want somebody who wants to round people up, put them in camps and send them back to Mexico.”

Josh Marshall (10:15a.m.): Lerner Must Go … Ezra Klein (9:45a.m.): Heads should roll at IRS... Just 18 hours earlier, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo were spotted headed into the West Wing with a gaggle of other left-wing columnists. It should be noted that Klein doesn’t specifically call for Lois Lerner to be fired, but both are calling for "firings" at the IRS within a half-hour of one another.

It's been a tough year for the liberal cable news outlets. Data released Tuesday show CNN shedding 48 percent of total viewers since last November and MSNBC dropping 45 percent. The numbers were even worse in the all important demographic of people aged 25 to 54 as CNN's ratings dropped 59 percent and MSNBC's 52 percent.

I was once proud to be reporter. But the "avert your glance" mentality of the MSM on Benghazi/IRS makes me ashamed of my old profession.

Postmodernism - the theory that there are no absolute facts or eternal truths, only interpretations based on power machinations - seeped out from university English departments into the larger elite culture.

Such relativism may explain the epidemic of fake news accounts and plagiarism as alternative "narratives" rather than simple untruths.

CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has reached an agreement to resign from CBS News ahead of contract... Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network's liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network's corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said.

Yearning for a "right-wing" suspect, the press is sorely disappointed. Narrative Fail.

During her Friday program on the "Fox Business Network," Melissa Francis made a truly scandalous revelation. "when I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of Obamacare simply didn't work. Not the politics by the way; just the basic math. And when I did that, I was silenced."

U.S. cable T.V. operator Cablevision Systems Corp (CVC.N) is planning to make an offer for the New York Daily News as early as this week, valuing the troubled tabloid at just $1, according to a person familiar with the matter... Cablevision's $1 bid takes into account the New York Daily News' reported $30 million annual loss and $150 million investment in a printing press, and declining circulation...

The Liberal Press, February 2017...

The Associated Press Gets It

SpectacularlyWrong

The Department of Homeland Security is roundly condemning an Associated Press story that broke Friday morning about considering the use of the National Guard to “round up” undocumented immigrants.

The AP also reported that Kelly wrote the memo, but Christensen told The Daily Beast that that is “absolutely incorrect.” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, denied the AP’s report on Twitter shortly after it published. “Not true. 100% false,” he tweeted.

Politico‘s Kyle Cheney admitted that he fabricated a negative story about Ben Carson. At least, according to his own standards, he admitted the grievous journalistic sin. In a story published early on Friday, Politico’s Kyle Cheney authored a piece headlined “Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship” with a subhed “Carson’s campaign on Friday conceded that a central point in his inspirational personal story did not occur as he previously described.”

There were at least five major problems with the story:

• The headline was completely false

• The subhed was also completely false

• The opening paragraph was false false false

• The substance of the piece was missing key exonerating information

• The article demonstrated confusion about service academy admissions and benefits

[Sept 2016]: Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.

Asked if there was any chance her faintness on Sunday could be a sign of some more “serious” illness, Clinton said he did not believe that was the case. “Well if it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors,” he said, “because frequently—well not frequently, rarely—but on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing happened to her when she got severely dehydrated.”

But when the segment aired, the bolded section was edited out, cutting to a reverse shot of Rose nodding to cover up the jump.

Here’s a quiz for you folks in the media: What happens if you’re out doing "man on the street" interviews but none of the men on the street fits your "narrative"? If you’re CNN, you stop interviewing them. -Naomi Schaefer Riley

It is almost like the Soviet Union, but worse. At least in the Soviet Union, there was a penalty for not collborating with the state. These guys do it quite voluntarily. They do it because they are on the team. -Chris Plante

ONLY two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were black. None were Latino or Asian. That’s less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far. -Liz Spayd, NYT Public Editor

CBS issued a damning independent review Monday of mistakes related to last fall’s "60 Minutes Wednesday" report on President Bush’s National Guard service and fired three news executives and a producer for their "myopic zeal" in rushing it on the air.

Nobody is safe from the media. That’s what they want you to believe, but in such a way that no one clearly states it, that nobody clearly admits it, so that they always retain plausible deniability. -"Dystopic"

If you don’t know who Kermit Gosnell is, that’s because you read the New York Times and Politico.com, and you watch network news. Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortionist who’s currently on trial for murder. Multiple counts.